On my first trip to Israel, to study at Pardes, I kept hearing this word mamash. My street Hebrew being pretty limited, I couldn't quite figure out what mamash means. Turns out that, like most Hebrew words, mamash can mean a lot of things. In the Talmud, it means "literally," as in the Gemara to Bava Kamma 83b, which asks why not take literally (mamash) the Torah's eye-for-an-eye rule? In modern Hebrew, mamash can also mean literally, actually, or very, depending on the context. Mamash also has the sense of reality in a tangible way. For me, as a Jewish artist,...